


the promises in songs of yesterday

by middnighter



Category: Blue Beetle (Comics), Booster Gold (Comics), DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Gen, set in the cw universe, ted and booster are rip's dads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-21 23:15:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17651516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middnighter/pseuds/middnighter
Summary: CW Rip meets a stranger.





	the promises in songs of yesterday

**Author's Note:**

> written for the boostle giftathon!!

One of the things you never really got used to, Rip Hunter thought, when you travel through time and across dimensions, was meeting people you already knew but who hadn’t met you yet.

There was something very unsettling about staring at a familiar face, and seeing a blank polite look where something much deeper used to be. Especially when it came to his parents.

Time was a tricky little thing.

It had become a pet project of his, to keep tabs on his parents’ counterparts from alternative universes. At first, it was only about getting information to satisfy his curiosity. Gideon helped him keep a map on hand, of what happened, what would happen. And the more he looked, the more he noticed little things. Simple as rocks in a river’s stream. That a trained hand could… move, and change the river’s path ever so slightly. Just enough to make things better for Booster and Ted.

He knew he probably shouldn’t spend time on something that was essentially a _personal errand_ when time needed protecting, but really, who wouldn’t at least consider it, with the resources he had access to?

The first time it happened, it was completely by accident. He was in Star City around the beginning of the twenty-first century, trying to prevent rogue time-travelers from stealing research on renewable energy.

After a lot of running around, Rip managed to catch up to the thieves, and he got them to give the files back by threatening to unleash an imaginary back-up team and by making the spaceship shimmer menacingly, which scared them enough.

Maybe having a team wouldn’t be such a bad idea. He would put some thought into it later.

Rip quietly pushed open the door of the building and made his way to the lab where the documents were stolen from, to give them back to their rightful owners and put the timeline back on track.

“Excuse me, I don’t think I’ve seen you here before,” a voice called from somewhere behind him.

Rip froze. It was the middle of the night, who in their right mind would still be in their lab?

He turned around, and found himself face to face with Ted.

His Ted, before Kord Industries, before the Blue Beetle, even.

Just Ted. Younger, with goggles on his forehead and considerable bags under his eyes.

And it hit Rip like a pile of bricks that he completely overlooked doing some research on his dads from his own timeline.

“I, uhh… I found this on a desk upstairs, in the biochem lab,” Rip improvised, handing the papers to Ted. “It’s not ours, so I thought I’d come down here and check who it belongs to.”

Ted’s face lit up. “That’s mine! I’ve been looking for it all evening,” he said, going through the pages. “Thank you so much!”

Rip gave him a smile, trying to think about the course of action that would leave the less impact on his timeline. Accidentally erasing himself from existence was the last thing he wanted.

“You said you found it upstairs?” Ted said.

Rip nodded.

“Well, thank you for coming by. You’ve saved me years worth of work.” He carefully stacked the pages together and put them on a shelf over a workbench covered in various tools and half-built prototypes.

Rip looked at him, wishing that he had done enough research to know what to say to make sure he stayed on the right track.

Then Ted grabbed a screwdriver and started working on a blue shoulder piece, and Rip thought that things might just go all right.  “Good luck,” he said. “I won’t bother you any longer, I have to get going.”

“Thank you again!” Ted said, the tired lines on his face softening. “Feel free to come by tomorrow, when the shops are open and I’ve gotten some rest. I’ll buy you coffee.”

“Will do,” Rip said, and walked out of the lab.

Once he was outside, he called the ship to him.

“Gideon,” he said. “Pull out the map.”

The hologram map appeared in front of him, and he added the interaction to a new branch, his family branch. Gideon wouldn’t reply to all his questions, on the basis that him knowing too much about it would disturb the timeline.

Still, when he showed up for that coffee the following day, he was better prepared.

There was something different about this Ted compared to the other Teds, Rip thought. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, save for the fact that his laugh sounded more reserved.

“You’ve been working a lot?” Rip asked, even if he knew the answer.

Ted shrugged his shoulders. “I have a lot of things I want to do, and not enough time to get around doing even half of them.”

“Maybe taking a break would help. Clearing your head, come back with a fresh mindset.”

Ted looked at him pensively. “Maybe you’re right,” he murmured.

“You should try the park,” Rip suggested. “There’s a nice bench by the pond, I spend some time there when I need to unwind. It’s a beautiful day today, getting out for a few hours can’t hurt.”

“You know what?” Ted said. “I’ll give it a shot.”

Rip hid a smile. He knew that park, that pond, very well, from the story of how Booster Gold arrived in that time period. The story of how his parents met.

* * *

The man was right, Ted thought. He expected to spend a few minutes there to indulge a stranger who did him a favor, and then come right back to his lab, his head buzzing with new ideas on how to _finally_ get that prototype to fly. But instead, he found himself sitting on the bench, humming a song, looking at the reflection of the trees in the water.

Then the air above the pond started to shimmer. Ted blinked his eyes a few times, but the hallucination did not seem to want to disappear. Instead, it flashed yellow and white, and what looked like a ten feet tall spherical machine materialized, and collapsed in the pond.

Ted jumped on his feet and watched as water splashed out of the pond and the sphere sank.  

A hand covered by a shiny blue glove grasped the grass, and Ted dashed forward to help. He grasped the man’s arm and dragged him out of the water.

“Who are you?” Ted said, a little breathless, to the man in a soaking wet blue and gold metallic get-up, his blonde hair sticking to his forehead.

“My name is Booster Gold. I’m a superhero.”


End file.
